Self-driving cars are already deciding who to kill

Autonomous vehicles are already making profound choices about whose lives matter, according to experts, so we might want to pay attention.

"Every time the car makes a complex maneuver, it is implicitly making trade-off in terms of risks to different parties," Iyad Rahwan, an MIT cognitive scientist, wrote in an email.

The most well-known issues in AV ethics are trolly problems—moral questions dating back to the era of trollies that ask whose lives should be sacrificed in an unavoidable crash. For instance, if a person falls onto the road in front of a fast-moving AV, and the car can either swerve into a traffic barrier, potentially killing the passenger, or go straight, potentially killing the pedestrian, what should it do?